When Rodney Dietert began his scientific career studying the immune system in animal models as an immunogenetics PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, he had no idea his path would lead him so deep into public health and human microbiome research. Now a professor at Cornell University, Dietert credits his wife, Janice Dietert, a science editor and novelist, for spurring his venture into public-health research. As a former learning-disabilities specialist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, Janice Dietert noted connections between her husband’s immunology, toxicology, and microbiome research, and the chronic health and neurological issues plaguing many of the disabled adults she had worked with.
When he was invited to write a journal paper describing what he thought was the key biological sign of a healthy life, Rodney Dietert says the concept of the “completed self” came to him in the middle of the night, ousting his previous immune system–centric focus for the article. To him, the microbiome a baby acquires during a natural birth and early life is vital to the development of an adequately functioning immune system. “We are intended in our healthiest state to be majority microbial,” he says. The Dieterts, who live in Lansing, New York, with their two dogs, discuss this concept of the completed self in “The Sum of Our Parts.”
ROBERT KOZLOFF/THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOAs long as geneticist Jerry Coyne has been in science, he’s enjoyed writing for nonscientists. He has written more than a hundred book reviews and articles for publications like The Times Literary Supplement and The New Republic, beginning during his days as a graduate student at Harvard University, then as a postdoc at the University of California, Davis, and finally as a faculty member, first at the University of Maryland and later at the University of Chicago, where he has studied speciation since 1996.
Throughout his career, Coyne has remained active in the lab, mentoring just one student at a time. “My philosophy’s always been that if you replace yourself with one good student, you will be a success.” He’s now replaced himself five times over. “I come from a lineage of scientists who not only worked in the lab with their own hands, but refused to take credit for their students’ work,” says Coyne. “I’m proud of that ...
